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Disney’s new ‘spider-drone’ can climb up walls

VertiGo, a Disney-developed robot that uses propellers to climb up walls, is the latest in gravity-defying robot technology.

If you’ve ever piloted a remote-controlled car, you’re familiar with the question we all ask ourselves after a couple of minutes of zooming around over horizontal surfaces: “Why can’t this thing climb straight up a vertical wall and scoot around like a fly or a gecko or some sort of tree frog?”

Well be disappointed by devices that obey the laws of physics no longer, because Disney Research Zurich and Swiss university ETH have concocted VertiGo, a prototype wall-gripping robot that appears to do just that.

In the age of consumer quadcopters, it’s perhaps not all that surprising to see a small device that ca...

We’re back in Adam’s cave to check out his latest obsession, a robot spider with incredibly realistic movement. Adam shows off the special box and platform he built to tinker and calibrate the spider, and then sends it crawling around the pool table in his shop. It’s not for the arachnophobic!

There are robots that walk around like spiders, there are robots that avoid objects, and there are robots that talk, but what about a robot spider that talks while avoiding objects? Hobbyist Kevin Ochs’ creation, Charlotte, is just that. Charlotte is a hexapod robot with a talking head that lets it narrate its progress as it avoids collisions.

Charlotte is an in-progress project started by Ochs as a way of brushing up on his C++ programming skills. It began life a commercially available robot kit sold by Trossen Robotics that Ochs equipped with a brain in the form of a Raspberry Pi overclocked to 1000Mhz running on C++ with custom coding.